Stripping Special Char?

[Arty Ziff]

When I use DOM to extract content from HTML text files, I get "funny characters"

âsomethingââsomethingââ

When I look at the source, there is just white space.

$dom = new DOMDocument();
$dom->preserveWhiteSpace = false;
$dom->loadHTML($tblock[$i]);
$xpath = new DOMXPath($dom);

$tags = $xpath->query('//div[@class="desc"]/h2[@class="name"]');
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
	$tname[$i] = trim($tag->nodeValue);
	echo $tname[$i]."<br>";
}

How can I strip out those invisible special chars?